Clearly 2560*1600 is useless, and I'd have preferred a 1920*1200 panel (or actually I don't care, I think I'm not buying the N10 after all), but if I recall correctly it was Apple who started the trend of "more pixel density is better" with their "retina" display.

It's kinda funny to see how when I said I preferred an AMOLED display to a 'retina' LCD apple users answered that retina was better because it had more pixels, and now that the Nexus 10 has even more it's useless XD(Exactly in the same way that Android fanboys used to say the iPhone was rubbish because the Nexus One had an SD card slot and removable battery, and since the Nexus S they don't care about Sd cards anymore ;-) )Reply

I'm not an Android fanboy but I have been disappointed with the Nexus devices both dropping micro SD slots hence my current phone is a Note and I'm pleased to see Samsung still offering removable batteries and micro SD expansion..

I wouldn't mind it too much if they had offered higher storage amounts with the phones! There have been a lot of issues with SD storage on android so I can see why they basically decided to dump it for the nexus line. Reply

'It's kinda funny to see how when I said I preferred an AMOLED display to a 'retina' LCD apple users answered that retina was better because it had more pixels, and now that the Nexus 10 has even more it's useless XD'

Just to clarify, this can logically make sense.

The AMOLED displays you preferred was seen as 'not as good' because it had a lower resolution and said lower resolution was visible.

Adding more pixels than the iPad, depending on your eyesight, can arguably add little to no value if the end user isn't able to tell the difference.

In other words, there is a point beyond which adding more pixels adds little benefit, that doesn't mean that it applies from any starting point.Reply

As someone that doesnt buy Apple products and sticks more to Google, and I think I speak for a lot of people here; SHUT THE FUCK UP. Youre a fucking moron. Take your petty little boy bullshit and go to another website. This place is for adults. Reply

English is a world language and thus lot of readers here, including me, won't be American, especially because AT used to be a reliable review source.I doubt that the 'non American readers' are a minority. So international models aren't irrelevant at all.Reply

As the owner of an International S3 who lives in the US(Indiana), I would like to dispute this. Just because they are called "International" doesn't mean you can't get them in the US. A friend of mine has an International HTC One X.

It is harder to get them of course, but there is no law preventing their use that I am aware of and most carriers will still allow you to use a non branded phone on their network so long as the phone supports their network frequencies.Reply

I'm not American either and the international version is of huge interest to me so please don't go presuming what is relevant and irrelevant - I hope Anand holds no stock by comments such as yours when deciding what to use in benchmarks.Reply

And What is it you do during the weekdays? I'd love to see what you're doing review-wise. No one Is forcing you to come to AT To read mobile reviews. Anandtech Is Hand's down the best reviewer. Whether it comes to CPU GPU or mobile phone/Tablet hands on. Show me a single site that takes the time to compile reviews and scores and benchmarking in the same place. Not a 24 hour review of something held in hand and played with in the office for a day---Anand continuously refers to out of date benchmarking in the mobile arena-and is continuously updating and/or finding better measurement tools. Are you really that ignorant? He's using Almost every single benchmark for mobile devices on the market. Not his fault that android continues to fail the tests in comparison with Apple products. Perhaps fail is too strong of a word however android is obviously now just catching up to the last generation Apple devices...with today's available benchmarking tools availableThat's not his fault...and for the biggest groups of SIII owners, in America, they're NOT using the international versionIn fact, I'm blown away how poorly the 'US' SIII continues to underwhelm in All benchmarkingI develop for both platforms. I am a fan of both Apple and android. I own a half-dozen devices from each side. Tablets--Xoom, N7 (w/N10 on the way), and a first gen Galaxy note...I've also got a GSIII. Each iteration of iPad, the 3GS, 4, 4s & 5. My hope? They Both continue to strive to better their operating systems and UI's....however, the biggest hurdle? Android's joke of an SDK in comparison with Apple's SDK and 'free XCode'---development for Apple's tablets are so much further ahead in comparison. I'm truly hoping google gets a bit more interested in helping the Dev community...again, especially on the tablet front. Two big powers help all of us--whether you're pure Android, ONLY iOS...or, you're a real geek like myself & you dig both!Reply

I always read their mobile benchmarks with a grain of salt, especially when they mixes in iProducts. For "whatever" reason, it does not reflect my real life usage.(My gf always casts envy eyes on the battery life of my SGS# ;)Anyway, reviews are only reviews, therefore it should be only use as a reference.Reply

Envoius of SGS3 battery life? What terrible phone is she using? I had the SGS3 for 2 weeks myself and I actually decided to return it because of the poor battery life (among a few other reasons). I really wanted to like it, but it just wasn't great for me.

I had both the SGS3 and iPhone 5 on my person for 2 weeks and tested them a lot. With the SGS3 I was only getting 4-5 hours of screen-on time where as I was getting 7-8 hours on the iPhone 5. The SGS3 would drain 20% overnight doing nothing (no background services, no notifications) The iPhone 5 drains 3% in the same timeframe even with all my notifications turned on, in the same location. Both have 1 bar of HSDPA in my apartment.

I don't understand what kind of usage people are getting on their SGS3s who say they have great battery life. When I used both phones side by side it was clearly not very good.

Everyone has opinions, I just kept having problem after problem with the iPhone 4 and switched to Android and love it. I didn't like how every time I wanted to do something, there was Apple saying I cannot.

I've never had any problems with Android and battery life, if it runs out then I just have another battery and switch it out, sorted.Reply

You shouldn't have to turn stuff off every night. The phone should put wireless stuff into a very low power/sleep mode when not in use, and should use very little power like that. I don't use an Apple device, but I almost never touch wireless settings. It would annoy the heck out of me to have to do so every night and morning. I'd rather charge it every night, if those were my two options.Reply

A phone doesn't know when you don't need this stuff, so you have to tell the phone somehow that you don't need BT at the moment, ...Wifi always has to scan the surrounding to get detected and to detect access points. If it doesn't do this, it won't be able to connect on its own. But scanning consumes battery life.The same with BT and every other bidirectional wireless technology.GPS is different and it does go to sleep if no app needs it, but sometimes some apps request GPS even if not necessary. But then it's not the fault of Apple or Google, but the fault of you installing such a poorly written app. Because Apple doesn't allow background tasks and likes to limit the options of the user it's a minor issue on iOS but a bigger on Android, but it's your decision to use or not use such apps.

However, on android you just have to swipe down the status bar to get access to such settings in an instant. Or even better, use NFC tags, so the smartphone knows exactly what profile you like in the car, on your desk, in your office, ...Or I use a setting/app which automatically turns on Wifi and off the lockscreen if my phone gets charged, because then I'm at home. So I don't have to do it either.But never phones, thanks to NFC allow more comfortable options just as mentioned.Reply

If it's draining that much overnight, then there is something keeping the phone awake, in the land of ANdroid, there are tools that can be used to find the issue and fix it, no need to wait on an update from Apple

As usual, in your effort to try to put blame on the device, it is clear that this is a PEBPAC

I have owned Samsung Galaxy devices with poor battery life and compared to the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5 it is truly an issue. If I get an Android phone it will have to be a Razr Maxx, otherwise an iPhone 5 is the right choice.Reply

Similar to what others have said, my 4S also gets 2 days with fairly heavy usage. Hell, today I'd say I had rather light usage (probably only 30 minutes of streaming audio through the internal speaker, and some browsing), I've only dropped down to 92%.Reply

Using mobile benchmarks to judge devices as a potential customer is pretty frustrating. Same hardware in different devices gets different scores, sometimes by huge amounts, and we don't always know where the variation comes from. Not to mention that the most often used benchmarks may not correspond with actual use anyway.

So, the important question is how well do these benchmarks correspond to real-world use? Does a device that scores 2x in a bunch of benchmarks really feel 2x faster? Does it depend on what you're doing, or is the network speed the limiting factor for web browsing anyway? These are the kinds of questions that are important to actual customers...after the 'new shiny' benchmark e-peen high wears off, we are left actually using the device. Anything you can do to help answer these questions would be awesome - we need an Anandtech Smartphone Bench!Reply

For most of the every day benchmarks, like Google's Octane, my Galaxy Nexus actually performs better. For example, I get a 1300+ score for octane in browser (not chrome). I'm not overclocked, just running a recent build of AOKP.

In what way is the nexus 4 a real upgrade over the Galaxy Nexus if not in speed? The Galaxy Nexus display is pretty impressive still (especially if you're using a ROM which punches the brightness up to an appropriate like AOKP does and makes it quite readable in sunlight), its performance is still as good or better than than the Nexus 4 for day-to-day tasks, and the Galaxy Nexus doesn't have a lot of weak points (other than a less-than-incredibly-impressive camera). Mind you, even the camera isn't as weak as it's often made out to be: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/cell-phones/galaxy-nexus... Granted, the Nexus 4 has more power in the graphics department, but ever since Jelly Bean I haven't wished for more graphical smoothness.

I wouldn't mind 2gb of RAM, but other than that, I fail to see how this is a big advance unless you're a hard-core gamer, and even then I rarely wish for more gaming horsepower on my GN.Reply

On a Nexus 7 @ 1.6 GHz with the latest (1st November) update I get a sunspider of 1300ms ~, on stock AOSP 4.1.2 Browser I get 1100ms~. Chrome as a default browser is not great, on the Chromium logs there is mention of Chrome for Android next milestone as version 24, so I was hoping for a increase in performance using Chrome in 4.2.

Just re-run Sunspider at stock on a Nexus 7, I still get 1500~ms. Anand are you running the latest version of Chrome from the play store, as it apparently has improvements relevant to the Nexus 4 & 10?

I hope Google has not cobbled these Nexus gems with a browser than never should have left beta.Reply

That's not quite true.The Exynos 5 according to this test is now king of the hill in the Egypt HD Offscreen test.

Of course it cannot compete with the iPhone 5 running at 1/4 of its resolution, so the Offscreen test is the only one which measure the GPU performance on a level playground.

All the other synthetic tests (fill rate, triangles, etc) are meaningless and in the PC industry they've been long abandoned as measure of performance, being unreliable, unrealistic and easy to optimize for / cheat.Reply

'That's not quite true.The Exynos 5 according to this test is now king of the hill in the Egypt HD Offscreen test.'

Um, no.

There are lots of offscreen tests, two Egypt ones. The Exynos 5 powering a TABLET loses to the iPhone 5 (a smartphone) in all but one of the off screen tests, including an Egypt Classic Off-Screen test.

Then there's the iPad 4 which Apple claimed doubles graphics performance. It wont even be close.Reply

The Egypt tests are the only "game like" tests where an actual scene is being rendered.

The others are synthetic tests which as I said have been long abandoned in the PC industry due to being meaningless, unreliable and prone to cheating (the older guys will certainly remember the early days of NVidia VS 3Dfx :)

Of the 2 Egypt tests, the "Classic" is representative of games and graphic complexity of 1-2 year ago, while the HD indicates what's coming next year.

And yes Exynos 5 is powering a tablet now, but will trickle into smartphones in the coming months, for sure will be in the SGS 4.Reply

So firstly you believe that you know better than Anandtech and you can decide that you're only going to listen to the 1 out of 10 or so benchmarks in which the product you clearly support barely comes out on top.

Then, you're going to claim that the same clock speed and performance will be found in smartphones, despite the atrocious battery life of this in tablet form.

And finally, you're just going to stick your fingers in your ears and shout 'la la la' because you didn't want to hear the fact that the already-out iPad will surpass this in performance by a long way.

Second: It's not that I didn't want to hear about the iPad 4 performance, i just hadn't seen any review out at the time i was writing. Now i did.

Third: you're free to believe whoever you want, but I do not need to believe to Anand, although i generally consider it a reputable site. As a computer engineer with enough specific knowledge on such matters, i believe i understand enough to form my own opinion.Benchmarks for mobile phones and tablets are in the stone age.Several "reputable" tech websites have been posting Quadrant scores for years to compare phones performance.Should I believe those?I've personally witnessed Quadrant scores being increased by factor 2.5x on the SAME DEVICE, with minor tweaks on a custom rom.Tweaks which did not yield ANY tangible improvement in any other application.

Browser based benchmarks: well they're just that, BROWSER benchmarks.On my device if I test 3 different browsers, i get Sunspider and Browsermark scores which range anything between 50% and 100% (the latter being the "fastest" browser).Chrome is NOT the fastest browser, btw.

GLBenchmark: out of all those tests, only 2 actually render a game like scene. Those are Egypt HD and Classic. Then these are divide between "normal" and Offscreen scores.Only Offscreen scores are run at the same resolution on all devices, so they're the only ones which can be used to compare GPU performance.Bit IF you want to compare *per DEVICE* framerates, then off course resolution is relevant and you should look at the "on screen" scores.

Finally the other tests from GLBenchmark like Fillrate and Triangle throughput: when you want to buy a PC graphic card, do you base your purchase on 3DMark scores, or on a dozen GAMES average fps scores, games which the *reputable* tech sites update on a yearly basis?

The PC industry has moved on from synthetic benchmarks.. 10 to 15 years ago.Before we had things like, NVidia's Riva 128 beating 3Dfx in synthetic benchmarks, and then people scratching their head when their games were not running as smoothly as on their friends' 3DFx.

Fourth: a quad core Snapdragon Pro, running more slowly than its dual core sibling (which has also a lesser GPU), and slower than its IDENTICAL TWIN sold under another name (LG), doesn't sound right to me and makes me think that there were issues during the test (either of HW, SW or methodology nature).

'Second: It's not that I didn't want to hear about the iPad 4 performance, i just hadn't seen any review out at the time i was writing. Now i did.'

But we knew it would represent a significant increase over the iPad 3 (based on Apples 2x performance claim) which only lost out to a tablet you claimed is the undisputed king of tablet performance by a small margin in 1 of 10 tests.

'Benchmarks for mobile phones and tablets are in the stone age.Several "reputable" tech websites have been posting Quadrant scores for years to compare phones performance.Should I believe those?'

If they post Quadrant scores, they aren't reputable.

GL benchmarks are different, and a great indicator.

'Browser based benchmarks: well they're just that, BROWSER benchmarks.On my device if I test 3 different browsers, i get Sunspider and Browsermark scores which range anything between 50% and 100% (the latter being the "fastest" browser).Chrome is NOT the fastest browser, btw.'

Nothing I said was about browser benchmarks. And take any of the browsers you like, they all come out slower than even the iPhone 5.

'GLBenchmark: out of all those tests, only 2 actually render a game like scene. Those are Egypt HD and Classic. Then these are divide between "normal" and Offscreen scores.Only Offscreen scores are run at the same resolution on all devices, so they're the only ones which can be used to compare GPU performance.'

The reason there are different tests is that different games can put different demands on each aspect of the GPU, such as the Fill test. Thus, one single game running a 'game like scene' is not representative of all, and this is also why the other benchmarks are equally important.

' or on a dozen GAMES average fps scores, games which the *reputable* tech sites update on a yearly basis?'

Where do I see a dozen game FPS scores? And are the games at the same resolution and quality? FPS isn't the only measure of performance. Same FPS at higher quality is a better user experience.

'Before we had things like, NVidia's Riva 128 beating 3Dfx in synthetic benchmarks, and then people scratching their head when their games were not running as smoothly as on their friends' 3DFx.'

Talking about old benchmarks not being representative says nothing about newer benchmarks.

'Fourth: a quad core Snapdragon Pro, running more slowly than its dual core sibling (which has also a lesser GPU), and slower than its IDENTICAL TWIN sold under another name (LG), doesn't sound right to me and makes me think that there were issues during the test (either of HW, SW or methodology nature).'

And even the 'Identical twin' in the Chromebook is different again. So either you've got 2 defective devices there or my point is correct that just because they use the same architecture doesn't equal the same performance.Reply

"But we knew it would represent a significant increase over the iPad 3 (based on Apples 2x performance claim) "

So just because Apple claimed a 2x performanceincrease, we should have blindly believed them?Finally you show your bias...(as for me, NOW THAT I'VE SEEN TESTS of the iPad 4, I have no problem calling it King of the Hill of GPU performance).

"If they post Quadrant scores, they aren't reputable.GL benchmarks are different, and a great indicator."Says who?On what are you basing such claims?A benchmark made by.. Kishonti Informatics, based in.. Budapest?Who are they?I could code an OpenGL benchmark as well.It's not like it was a cross industry independent committee which developed such a benchmark, like, i don't know, the SPEC Consortium?

"The reason there are different tests is that different games can put different demands on each aspect of the GPU, such as the Fill test. Thus, one single game running a 'game like scene' is not representative of all, and this is also why the other benchmarks are equally important."NO, if you knew how one of such tests was implemented, or had any idea of how to write one, you'd know that such synthetic benchmarks stress ONE SINGLE aspect in isolation, creating totally unrealistic conditions.For example, fill rate tests have an incredibly low number of polygons, and poly throughput tests have 1 pixel large triangles.And none use complex shaders.One architecture can do great in synthetic tests, but for example not having enough bandwidth for keeping up with the same performance once you turn on all the bells and whistles.This has been proven over and over again in the past, and it is proven here by the Egypt scene.

And mind you, i'm not even advocating the Egypt benchmark to be reliable, it's just a little bit less unrealistic and meaningless as the others.

"Where do I see a dozen game FPS scores? And are the games at the same resolution and quality? FPS isn't the only measure of performance. Same FPS at higher quality is a better user experience."Open any PC graphic card review on Anandtech or reputable competing sites.And yes FPS is not the only measure of perfomance, but since you cannot change quality settings on mobile phone games, the quality argument doesn't hold candle here.

"And even the 'Identical twin' in the Chromebook is different again. So either you've got 2 defective devices there or my point is correct that just because they use the same architecture doesn't equal the same performance. "

The Chromebook runs a DIFFERENT OS!And a different SW stack!That makes the difference!But the LG Optimus G and the Google Nexus 4 ARE THE SAME PHONE on the SAME OS!With the difference of phone storage size and SD Card slot.And minor SW customizations.There is no point about "same architecture", here we're talking about the exact same CPU!

So if the Google Nexus 4 can't complete any benchmark without clock throttling, you cannot post numbers scored while throttling, it doesn't make any sense!And does numbers will never be repeatable, depending on current temperature of the room, battery status, previously run sw, etc!If a device cannot complete a single run of a 3 minute benchmark without thermal throttling, that device is defective!So either you got a lemon, and then you should return it to the manufacturer or do further investigation.Or that device has a major manufacturing flaw, it should be announced and do everything so that it is recalled.Because nobody should buy a device which cannot run a 3min benchmark without throttling.Reply

'So just because Apple claimed a 2x performanceincrease, we should have blindly believed them?Finally you show your bias...(as for me, NOW THAT I'VE SEEN TESTS of the iPad 4, I have no problem calling it King of the Hill of GPU performance).'

Given that the iPad 3 and iPhone 5 already beat this Nexus 10 in most of these benchmarks, it would only have taken a 10% bump for the iPad 4 to dominate. Apple claimed 2x and has a track record of providing accurate estimates. Thus you'd have to be illogical and biased to claim any other outcome. That is obvious, and clear. And yes, you're right, the iPad 4 absolutely destroys the Nexus 4 and 10.

'Says who?On what are you basing such claims?'

Um, your whole point was how bad Quadrant scores are and how irrelevant they are, and your exact original claims depend on the accuracy of GL benchmarks. So you're criticising the very thing your point depends on.

'NO, if you knew how one of such tests was implemented, or had any idea of how to write one, you'd know that such synthetic benchmarks stress ONE SINGLE aspect in isolation, creating totally unrealistic conditions.'

I never said they didn't. I'm a 3D game designer, and I myself have written numerous benchmarks. If YOU had a clue, you would know that the individual aspects being broken down IS valuable because depending on the complexity and features of the scene being rendered, those different aspects are tested to different extents. It's clearly the combination of the entire pipeline which leads to the end result, but there's a reason your suggestion involves multiple games - they don't all require the same performance in all aspects. That's why you selecting the only benchmark the Nexus 10 beats a phone, is ridiculous. Especially given that there's another benchmark which uses the full pipeline and which it comfortably loses on.

'Open any PC graphic card review on Anandtech or reputable competing sites.And yes FPS is not the only measure of perfomance, but since you cannot change quality settings on mobile phone games, the quality argument doesn't hold candle here.'

You completely missed the point. I was asking you to show me the FPS results. Of all the games. The whole point is that there AREN'T ANY, so we can't use that benchmark, so the GL benchmark range is the best we have. The fact that you can't change the graphics settings is irrelevant. If your phone performance being poor means you can't play games at as high quality, you're losing out as a customer. Even if it plays at a resolution of 1x1 at 6,000 FPS. Such a primitive excuse to say that just because the quality is locked, it doesn't matter. Absurd, in fact. Fanboy excuses all over.

'The Chromebook runs a DIFFERENT OS!And a different SW stack!That makes the difference!But the LG Optimus G and the Google Nexus 4 ARE THE SAME PHONE on the SAME OS!With the difference of phone storage size and SD Card slot.And minor SW customizations.There is no point about "same architecture", here we're talking about the exact same CPU!'

Nope, sorry, they have very different hardware aspects, the whole heatsink arrangement is fundamentally different. They also only share certain parts in common, not every element.

Final paragraph of yours is just you illustrating that the Nexus 4 being so poorly built that thermal issues come to the fore (exactly as they have done on the better heat-managed Optimus G) is a reason not to buy it.

The fact that even picking the best results for this phone from the most favourable reviews in the most favourable conditions (or even with the most favourable browser), it still loses out by a long way to the iPhone 5, with lower battery life, no LTE, lower storage capacities, glass back, AndroidAuthority articles on its poor build quality, are just making my point more and more.Reply

It's doubtful. SSDs don't seem to improve battery life over HDDs that much, so that's a clue there.

The dominant power consumers are 1) the display, 2) the radios (with cellular consuming more than WiFi), and 3) the SoC. Everything else is will be in the noise. You can theoretically take power consumption of the storage to zero, and it'll be in the noise of the said big 3 players.Reply

Well if you pay attention to this preview, you'll see that the numbers are rather inconsistent.The Snapdragon S4 Pro here basically gets beaten in several tests by its lesser sibling the Snapdragon S4; that doesn't make any sense.

So you're saying that a company can't build two different devices of different quality levels? Off contract $550 phone vs a $300-350 phone, for example?

Maybe... you know... you get what you pay for? There's more to a phone than what processor it uses? Things like build quality, LTE, storage, memory card slot... speaking of memory card slots, Apple and MS took a lot of flack for this. Where's all the naysayers now? Matias Duarte of Google says you're all too stupid to use memory cards, what do you have to say about that?

Slightly off topid: The line in the article was about Google pricing the Nexus 10 "aggressively" made me chuckle a bit. Mostly because the lack of a memory card slot was one of the things I hated about iDevices, and here's all these Nexus devices without a card slot. So now I'm looking at the 32GB model for $500 and thinking competing models look more appealing now. Well except for iPad, I still don't want one of those, even though the iPad 4 is a screamer.Reply

Of course a company can build two different devices with differing build quality.There could be a myriad of reasons why the Optimus G looks so good in these tests, but as already stated above, there seems to be something else going on, which hopefully will be sorted before release.

Apple and MS take a bashing for no SD Card Slot and rightly so in my opinion, they never offered one period, you can get other Android devices with an SD slot, that's the beauty of choice.

The fact that Google, one of, if not the biggest "Cloud" providers on the planet want to push devices with no SD doesn't seem in line with their business model to you??

They've gone aggressive on all Nexus devices, not just the 10", why do you think the 7" at $199 has been such a runaway success.With the entry 10" at $399 for 16GB it's directly priced at iPad2 levels, given that choice it's a very tempting offer.Reply

Just want to give you a heads up that you might have another URL injecting bit of Javascript from one of your content partners (as happened with your Intel 330 SSD review back in August). I was redirected to:

from the first page of this article, congratulating me on getting a chance to win an iPad mini or a $1000 gift card. I don't see any embedded links in the text and i don't remember clicking on anything so it might just be my browser or PC ;-) but I am running Chrome and daily scans (which doesn't really count for much as it used to in this era of zero-day exploits). Reply

Anand and team. Please start reviewing tablets and comparing them to each other. I'd love to see the Surface models, Kindle HD models, IPADs, Nexus and Samsung devices pitted at each other. It would really help determine my next purchase.Reply

I don't understand why in review mobile phones and tablet performance has to be compared.. Also in Sunspider and browser test IPad performance is cleverly omitted .. And also if mobile phones has to be included, include best selling andriod phones for each benchmark tests..

Sure, the Nexus 4 results don't look good, even if you make a fair chart, but they look that bad that something must be wrong. Because AT only used Browser benchmarks, it must be a software issue!If the LG Optimus G has the same hardware, yet scores much higher in 3D benchmarks, then there's something wrong. If the Optimus G scores higher because the bencmark crashes, then it's unfair to include the benchmarks at all if you run it differently on other phones.

With this preview AT lost a lot of credibility because of their inconsistent comparisons and benchmark runs. I hope you'll fix it and also contact Google why the browser!! (not the CPU as you want to tell us) performs so bad on the Nexus 4.Reply

If there really isn't any cross-platform benchmarks, consider getting some written.

I don't take browser benchmarks seriously, at least not javascript ones. Stuff like page load time is real, but everybody and their dog is optimizing javascript right now. It's impossible for me to tell the speed of the hardware when the version of the javascript engine is probably different on each platform tested. That's not a good benchmark for comparing cpu's, though it may be fair for comparing phones/platforms on the whole.

I think stuff like app start time would be nice. I think all platforms have angry birds space (even surface), all of them have mail readers, browsers, etc.

Task switching performance, wifi file transfer speed. Seems like there's more that can be tested.

Number of steps and average time for an experienced user to perform basic operations (unlock, connect to wifi, install an app, write a text message, check weather, facebook etc.) etc. That kind of stuff would be nice. Also I see battery life tests, but never charge time tests.

DLNA/smartglass/apple tv type stuff, how cleanly does it work to send a media file, web link, youtube, etc to a tv or other device, and to get it back again or play to tablet type options.

Even a giant checklist of stuff you'd probably want to do and run, with how long it takes you to do it, and how quickly the device can do it, would be nice.Reply

Browsers, and hardware designers are all starting to ( have been for a while ) optimize for javascript performance.

The reason is simple. Any browser application that is doing anything serious will very likely be using javascript, and lot of it. Games, or regular applications.

Technically, the javascript engine is in the browser used. However, as stated above. Everyone should be optimizing their hardware for javascript performance. If they're not, or being lazy about it. Then they are just wrong.

Web apps are about as cross platform as it gets with mobile devices. With any semblance of ease, that is.Reply

GL Benchmark is written in c/c++ with platform dependant code for the ui. That's a common theme for many apps.

Apps with serious performance requirements are going to be written in c/c++. Especially in mobile where you have slow cpu's. Javascript is important, but it's not the end all be all.

Javascript is just like java, .net, python, php, and a whole host of other 'higher level' programming languages. It tends to not be as fast as c/c++. If you're application is cpu bound, you should be using c/++.

This x100. Give me real-world use scenarios, or at LEAST translate how 2x in a benchmark translates into real-world use. Does it seem that much faster, is the bottleneck elsewhere so it doesn't matter anyway, or whatever.Reply

Why do you call browser benchmarks as CPU benchmarks? You also don't compare the performance of different Intel CPUs by comparing the Sunspider results of IE with them done in Safari on a Mac.

Browser benchmarks are interesting, but please call them what they are: Browser benchmarks, not more not less. If you use a different browser, you'll get different results, with the same SoC. Thus name the Android version, browser version and Smartphone you used, everything else is misleading.

If you want to compare CPU speed, which I highly recommend, then do some single and multi-core number crunching with specific apps, just as it gets done on regular computer reviews, too.Reply

I'm extremely disappointed with the performance of the Nexus 4.You compare it (that's not meant as critique, as it's not officially available yet in most countires) with ICS devices. The performance increase with 4.1.1./4.1.2 is huge. The One X (Tegra 3) for example, scores a bit over 1000ms in SunSpider and 7000 in Quadrant.

The Nexus 4 however, despite having 4.2 on board is behind nearly everything else with comparable processors. I really hope it's just a 4.2 issue that will be fixed soon!Reply

Something certainly is iffy with the results as the mostly identical Optimus G seems to be beating the Nexus 4 by significant margins. I'm guessing a lot has to do with the benchmarking software not being updated for 4.2.

Also, I wouldn't put any faith in the browser tests - he's using the stock browser for Android phones which isn't as quick as Chrome for Android.Reply

I don't know about Chrome being faster than the stock browser. On my devices, the stock android browser pretty much demolishes Chrome on the benchmarks, and I actually prefer the way it renders (I love Chrome on my PC's).

But, oddly enough, my old Tegra 2 device browser-benchmarks considerably better than what I've seen listed for many newer (and certainly faster in other benchmark) devices.

As I said: Jellybean! Huge improvements were made there. A HTC One X with Jellybean scores under a little bit over 1000ms in SunSpider. So just imagine how those scores would look like if the other phones got updated to JB. The Nexus 4 would be WAY behind, even though it has NEWER software.

Also, the battery life is extremely weak. Compare it to the One X (granted that it has that companion core). Quadcore 40nm vs. Quadcore 28nm. 1600mAH vs. 2100mAH. The One X lasts way longer.Reply

Comparing a Verizon LTE phone against and AT&T LTE phone will yield different results, especially if there are significant coverage differences. For example, HTC One X AT&T vs Galaxy S3 Verizon on your chart. They both use the same radio platform basically, but obviously they have other factors such as the screen (SAMOLED takes more power than the One X's LCD) etc. However, when seeing the iPhone's numbers, we have no idea what carrier you're testing with. Reply

the extremely high latency shown in the speedtest screenshot? I sincerely hope that 1417ms ping times are a fluke and not the norm. who cares if you have 22Mb d/l speed when it takes 1.4s between packets.Reply

That ping time is not accurate. I frequently see a high ping when starting a Speedtest, but if I ping the ip of the test server in terminal emulator I'll see 60-85ms, which is definitely normal. I think it has to do with the radio coming out of power save. Try it for yourself. I'm using T-Mobile, btw. Reply

It seems Google hasn't changed the V8 engine in Chrome for Android pretty much since they officially launched it. Not to mention Chrome for Android just got upgraded to version 18, when we're supposed to get version 23 in a week or two on the desktop. Incredible. The Chrome browser is close to a year behind in Javascript improvements compared to Apple and its Safari for iOS which probably got upgraded just before launching iOS6.

It's very disappointing to see the very same chip score twice as slow in Chrome, because Google can't be bothered to treat it as seriously as they do on the desktop.Reply

I don't see how Google (or Samsung etc) can compete with Apple gen for gen until they switch to using Imagination's SGX as opposed to ARM's Mali. Particularly given the next gen "Rogue" architecture that will further widen the performance gap with an order of magnitude increase in performance.

The developing pattern for SoC is dual core CPU and then increasingly powerful GPU's.

I think you're falling into the trap of believing the current market of phone/tablet/pc is the way things will continue. Whereas I suspect the lines are set to become increasingly blurred and as mobile devices are used for content creation the performance demands will increase.

Imagination's series 6 "rogue" will completely blow away current gen mobile GPU's and will also bring Compute functionality to the SoC space.Reply

I'm pretty certain that, for the casual users, there's a very high percentage that play some sort of game on their phone (even if just Angry Birds). The GPU also impacts how fluid the UI is during transitions/animations.Reply

I agree with many posters above me: this is very misleading to say it is a "Performance" preview when it is actually just a browser benchmark. AT, I am more than sure you guys are smart people regarding tech, so really this is an unforgivable mistake; almost as if you have done this on purpose. If the readers can identify it being a potential software optimization, surely you can point it out too. Disappointing...Reply

The FCC tests were performed using 20 MHz channels. I am not sure whether the Nexus 4 supports 40 MHz channel width. It uses a single antenna for all Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. If I understand correctly, devices that support wide band Wi-Fi use two antennas simultaneously.

More information regarding the FCC 5GHz Wi-FI testing is contained on pages 33-34 in the file "SAR report part 1."

I get the general idea that, for whatever reason, it's fairly difficult to get anything more than a ballpark idea about relative speed when comparing smartphones. For instance, most of AT's benchmarks show the US version of the HTC One X as faster than the international version. Having had both of them sitting next to each other, my benchmarks don't bear that out. My benchmarks show the Internation version as considerably faster in cpu tests and in gpu tests, the two were roughly even.

Even in this article, my Octane score for the Int S3 and Int HOX were 3-400 points higher than AT has listed here. I'm not saying that AT's scores are invalid. My gripe is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency in the mobile computing space yet. Hopefully that changes with further generations of smartphones.Reply

I get the general idea that, for whatever reason, it's fairly difficult to get anything more than a ballpark idea about relative speed when comparing smartphones. For instance, most of AT's benchmarks show the US version of the HTC One X as faster than the international version. Having had both of them sitting next to each other, my benchmarks don't bear that out. My benchmarks show the Internation version as considerably faster in cpu tests and in gpu tests, the two were roughly even.

Even in this article, my Octane score for the Int S3 and Int HOX were 3-400 points higher than AT has listed here. I'm not saying that AT's scores are invalid. My gripe is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of consistency in the mobile computing space yet. Hopefully that changes with further generations of smartphones.Reply

I'll take these benchmarks with a grain of salt. My Galaxy Nexus on 4.1.2, running the stock kernel, with no overclocking, receives a 1601ms in Chrome, and 1420ms in the AOSP browser. I receive a 113031 on Chrome in browsermark, and a 133981 with the AOSP browser.

I'm indifferent in regards to the GPU benchmarks, because I'm able to play all current games on my Gnex with no noticeable lag. Once the software issues with the Nexus 4 are sorted out, I'm sure it will be noticeably better than my Galaxy Nexus. I'll still probably pick up a Nexus 4, if I like the screen, because one year of service with T-Mobile & a Nexus 4 only costs $660, which is the price of a SGS3, One X+, or iPhone 5. Reply

Have some perspective guys. For all intents and purposes, you can mix and match most of these ARM smartphones and tablets as they use the same platform. In most of these cases, it's basically the same SoC.

For GPU benchmarks, you must always keep the native resolution in mind when interpreting scores.

For CPU javascript benchmarks, it's basically the best we got to compare across platforms. It's highly sensitive to the browser and its JIT compiler, so it's typically best to compare across the same platform and browser version for those. They'll do linpack and others eventually, but that'll take time. If SpecINT and SpecFP could be ported, I'm sure they'll use those.

Ideally, Anandtech could write its own benchmark code and compile them for each platform, but that'll take time and effort they likely don't have. I'm sure they won't mind if someone else develops the code.Reply

Anandtech is like 3 or 4 guys, and they do lots of reviews on other hardware. The work to do this is not trivial, the benchmark software is not consistent across platforms and sometimes not consistent within platform versions. Every time a new benchmark is developed, a lot of devices have to be rerun. It's a rather difficult problem to continuously rerun benchmarks and make sure everything is consistent. It isn't going to happen fast, and there won't be a broad swath of hardware they'll have benchmarks on.

Take the benchmarks for what they are worth. They are there to characterize the performance of the platform. If you want to compare who's the winner between platform A versus platform B, the tools really aren't there to precisely do that.Reply

Looks like the S4 Pro was shoehorned pretty hard into a phone, kinda ironic considering the last two Nexus phones didn't really feature a SoC that was any better than what was on the market already (and people criticized them for it, now it may be the other way around). Shouldn't Qualcomm have a dual core Krait w/the new Adreno coming out towards year's end/next year?Reply

I simply don't get it. Do people really care if their phone is 9mm thick or 1.1cm?Give me a bit more thickness and a much larger battery. Motorola has it right with those MAXX phones and they aren't thick.Reply

Can someone please explain to me why these numbers are so spectacularly low?For example, when they say the sunspider test is run under "stock browser" do they mean chrome is the stock browser, or the actual stock browser.

The stock browser is substantially faster then chrome. My humble STOCK(unrooted, not overclocked) Galaxy Nexus running jelly bean 4.1.2 does sunspider in 1500ms.. with the stock browser, and 1900ms under chrome..

So why the hell is a brand new nexus 4 only pulling 1850?

similarly my again stock GNEX does 120,000 in browsermark stock browser, 114,000 in chrome. Why the heck is that so much higher then half the much more powerful phones on this list?

Why is the 1 year old tech - 1.2ghz dual core Galaxy nexus slotting between a GS3 and the HTC oneX in browser mark?Reply

Nexus 4 is very disappointing for a new Google Nexus product. It basically got thrashed like a rented mule. Apple has taken a much bigger step forward going from iphone 4-->5 than Google did with its rival.

Anyway, thanks for the benchmarks. The article does not have the in-depth coverage and attention you give to Apple products, but then again, looking at the benchmark results I can see why you would want to not bother at all.

Let's hope Nexus 5 fixes the many shortcomings of Nexus 4 in less than a year.Reply

People don't realize that the A5 was essentially a Samsung design. With the A5X and now A6, Apple has took over their SOC designs completely and made customizations to the silicon and software to go hand in hand.

Unlike Android devices where the software is coded by Google but the hardware is design and made by different vendors. You got Samsung and Qualcomm doing designs and relying on Google to write the perfect driver and no special hooks in the OS to favor advantages in the various SOC designs.

This is why we will continue to see bigger performance leaps from companies that have both the hardware and software components mastered.Reply

'Apple design' is extremely misleading. They didnt design anything inhouse until A6, what they did with A5 was: "Here I want these specifications, make it happen" and Samsung and Powervr delivered.Reply

It takes design to take IP blocks, lay them out in a die/SoC, and and fab them to the desired performance/power characteristics. They are gradually making things more and more custom than licensing IP, yes, but that still takes work.

TI does this with OMAP. Samsung does this with Exynos. You don't hear people say that TI didn't design OMAP nor hear that Samsung didn't design Exynos, do you?Reply

Apple iPhone 4 and now the iPad 4 beats the snot out of these Android devices.Better fit and finish, better support, better build quality, better app quality and selection, no malware, no carrier bloatware, no Google spying on your every move and selling the information. It's called innovation in design of chipsets and handset while maintaining high standards all the way around.You can't buy them in the bargain bin like even the latest Android devices or buy them at cost like Googles pathetic attempt to get someone, anyone to buy an Android tablet.On top of that the Androidians are twisting themselves into knots explaining why a glass back, no sd card slot, no LTE, and no removable battery are all of a sudden a good thing after criticizing Apple for those very things. It's hilarious to watch.Meanwhile AT&T is deprecating HSPA as quickly as it can and good luck with getting a decent signal from T-Mobile. Assuming they are even around a year from now.But hey you still have widgets....so there's that...The iPhone 5 is what happens when you are the customer. The Nexus 4 is what happens when you are the product.Reply

Why are the iPad screen numbers left out of the "Display" section? It looks like the Nexus 10 is pitted against smartphones here.. Kind of puzzling. Is it because you've only run these screen benchmarks on phones so far?

I've got one of these bad boys on order (iPad 4 w/ VZW LTE) but your numbers here for the N10 are pretty compelling. contrast especially. I'd really love to compare its display head to head vs the 3rd/4th gen iPad screens. Especially that contrast ratio on the N10 are very impressive. Microsoft made a point of this being a differentiation in their surface VS the iPad as well (contrast ratio & brightness), so I'm really looking forward to a "tablet display shootout" of sorts, even if it's just in the numbers.

Thanks for your hard work, I've been listening to your podcasts when I can and I find them to be a great supplement to the news & reviews you guys turn out. Keep up the good work!Reply

Your head just spins sometimes from all these charts. Its easy enough to analyse a few of them, but to comprehend and juggle what they all mean together in comparing devices to each other is a major feat. I agree with some other posters here - what does it *feel* like to use. Who cares if some device is 5 times faster than another if you don't actually get to see this benefitI don't play games on my portables, but I do appreciate some grunt in them still for doing other things.

Which brings me to something I'd like to suggest / see at ATI have never seen a good site review that talks about how good some of the other parts in these things are - things like compass, GPS & accelerometer tests. It might sound less interesting to most, but its becoming more and more important with location based apps.

eg. I use my phones for personal tracking (sports / geocaching / mapping / whatever), yet the GPS devices in some high end phones are anything but highend. They're woeful at waiting for a lock and woeful at keeping a lock, poor accuracy etc.

Also their compasses are often poor with reproducibility & accuracy too.

How about some subjective testing in this area ? Doesn't need to be overwhelming, just a 10 sample test for locking, 10 sample test for accuracy / keeping lock etc.

Compare it to a high end GPS device for example, something will real accuracy ?

I personally would find these tests more useful than how fast something can fill fragment lit triangles.....Reply

Anand, these browser benchmarks are becoming way too dependent on the browser. Can you at least add some Quadrant and other benchmarks in the mix, to see how they perform? And don't just show the final score like every other site does, show the scores for everything (CPU, GPU, memory, I/O, etc), and explain what they mean and how they compare with the others.Reply

It's the SAME chip. And yet Google's Chrome for Android, which is 4 versions behind the desktop Chrome, and probably has an even older V8 engine than that, manages to make this excellent chip that is normally faster than everything, perform twice more poorly.

At the end of the day, it's Google's screw-up for shipping both Nexus 10 and Nexus 4 in such a horrible shape in terms of the browser they are using, but I'm just noting this is not about the raw performance of the CPU here, but about the poor software Google put in here, as if they didn't even care what they slapped on top of the hardware.

The GPU does seem more powerful than Mali T604, but it also seems to sacrifice battery efficiency for extra performance, while Mali T604 does not. The iPad uses a significantly larger battery and significantly lower resolution, and yet it only beats the Nexus 10 by half an hour on battery life, which is less than 10%.Reply

Browsers are ridiculously complicated but the ways things are with android, currently, is that it looks like they are working with two code bases.Moving completely over to Chrome would help alot.In the meantime, Firefox is using a single code base so, aside from extensions which are so XUL dependent, things that work on the desktop should work in mobile.Reply

As they said several times, they had thermal issues.The Optimus G uses a different, thicker, casing than the Nexus, so that may be the difference.Aside from that, I'm puzzled by these results (which seem to be consistent across the sites). The s4 pro seems simply slower than the s4 (especially the one in the One S).I'd really like to see AT run the Dhrystone benchmark so we can see the variance from what was supposed to be the case.Checkout http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/snapdragon-s4-... where they find the DMIPS to be vastly lower than the 3.1 we were expecting (along with a memory interface that is only on par with the OMAP 4430).Why hasn't AT brought this up? Krait isn't next generation. It is only a bit better than A9, in general. Far behind Apple's A6 and, presumably, the Cortex A15.Reply

I think the krait is not far behind the cortex A15 in the same power range. We already see the performance difference of A15 between chromebook and Nexro 10. I suppose the difference is caused by the lower TDP in tablet. If the power consumption of A15 is further scaled down to the mobile level, who knows how performance wise it compare to krait.

The only different between krait, swift and A15 are they target different market, A15 to me is like netbook level processor, more like a low power AMD APU, but the krait and swift target mobile phone and tablet.

To me, ARM is not necessory means low power, it would not surprise me if I the server level ARM has a similar TDP as the intel offers. Reply

Well, AT were complaining of presumed thermal throttling in the phone while the netbook probably can dissipate a good deal more heat.Aside from that, yeah, chrome for android is terrible which is why i suggested they use firefox since that is available on all android devices of late.Reply

Again, checkout the link I gave above. They looked at both the s4 and s4 pro. Those weren't next gen results.Toms hasn't run the tests with the A6/swift yet, and AT ran extensive tests but only against other apple processors, but I expect swift to be a good deal quicker in general purpose benchmarks (kraken/geekbench/pts) clock-for-clock.Reply

I guess this may be a little late... Is there any performance difference because of the larger amount of flash storage? Is it like the SSD situation where there are more chips/channels/banks? I know I may be abusing terms.

To be honest I would like to know if the 32 GB Nexus 7 is faster in real life situations as you swap between tasks as I do notice pauses here and there. Should I return my new 16? How about with Nexus 10s different storage sizes?

On side note, when will I be able to switch between tasks without them pausing. I am seriously thinking Win 8 will be only OS tablet that will let you multi task and have multiple windows open at same time. I seriously need Hulu app to keep running while ad runs while I switch to browser. Seems like space age stuff in comparison to my 4.1.2 Nexus 7 tablet... The 10 should at least have some kind of side by side mode in landscape and top bottom in portrait mode... Guess I should Google Ubuntu on Nexus to see what window manager is there, but than no netflix, hulu, apps. So toy like... yes this is my first tablet. All new to me.Reply

You shouldn't have slow downs while switching between tasks in the Nexus 7. That is mostly a RAM/CPU issue and the Nexus 7 has plenty of both. However, if you can't wait for the AT review, theverge reviews the Nexus 10. They say there are no slow downs. It also has twice the RAM of the Nexus 7.Reply

What this review of benchmarks doesn't specify is the pre-release version of Android 4.2 that has been used. All reviews I have seen have the Nexus 4 using a kernel 3.4.0, while the Nexus 10 using a kernel 3.4.5. I am not sure if this applies to the units tested here, but I wonder if the same builds were used on both devices. This could go a long way in explaining the results. And in general, for any "scientific" benchmarking, I would expect those details to be listed, something that cannot be said for this review.Reply

Soo, there's talk of these fantastic displays for tablets and other such gadgets, but where's these mythical LCDs for laptops? The only one I've seen would be on the Macbook family, but I'm looking for a gamer, not a fashion statement, and a gaming laptop would certainly be better equipped for such displays.

It kinda makes me mad that a tablet would have a significantly better display than a multi-grand gaming laptop. Reply

Could you explain in what sense the Optimus G and Nexus 4 differ wrt to the below statement:

"the Optimus G can't complete a single, continuous run of GLBenchmark 2.5 - the app will run out of texture memory and crash if you try to run through the entire suite in a single setting. The outcome is that the Optimus G avoids some otherwise nasty throttling. The Nexus 4 on the other hand manages to complete everything, but likely quickly throttles its clocks down due to thermal constraints"Reply

I had high hopes for Note 10 - amazing resolution and latest processor from Samsung, plus buttery smooth UI.Sadly, in almost all of the benchmarks here the top is always iPad 3 and iPhone 5. Not to mention the latest iPad 4 is even powerful than iPad 3.

Looks like iPad 4 and iPhone 5 are the most powerful devices out there, end of story.Reply

No.If you take a look at the browser benchmark, you'll notice that the iPads are missing! Why, because they score worse than the Nexus 10. Because the Nexus 4 scores miserably compared to the identical LG Optimus G (which are missing on AT again), with the exception that the LG runs on ICS, we can safely assume that the used browser is responsible for the bad ratings and with a software update the results will, additionally, for the Nexus 10, too, greatly improve.

If you take a look at the GPU benchmark and exclude those meaningless synthetic benchmarks which can easily get manipulated or at least don't say anything about the real performance of the GPU, and compare the 3D scene benchmarks which the user will later experience then the Nexus 10 outscores the iPad 3. In Offscreen it's even the fastest. In the classic benchmark both hit 60FPS, so the classic benchmark became obsolete.

I still think the Nexus 4 numbers are flawed (maybe defective device with a bad SoC or other issues) because the Optimus G (the same device!!) scores much better, even better than the iPhone 5.

However, the iPad 4 will be much faster than the Nexus 10 in GPU power, no question.Reply

Bit of a non-issue for iOS users since their stock browser consistently dominates......because you didn't want to hear the fact that the already-out iPad will surpass this in performance by a long way...comparing new device vs new device, the Nexus 10 is miles behind the iPad 4...

1. Would U please shut up! I have an idea. Anatech Stop listing Apple benchmarks in Android reviews so AppFboiz like you stop posting your crAPPaganda. I love the "ummm. I guess Nexus x sucks so I'm getting the Iphone" posts too. Either these fb's have icrap hardware and a Steve Jobs candlelit shrine already or they really are that stupid (in that case they are making the right choice)

NO! Android users don't bail to Apple on a review (maybe decide between other Android devices) so quit posting this crap. I don't post Android propaganda on Apple review sites and personally prefer it if Nokia STOOD BEHIND Maemo instead of flushing their business down the Symbian and Microsoft tubes but anyway the point....

The Nexus . IS new software as well as hardware. Show me a phone with 4.2 on it... and.... the new Iclone is just rehashed same-old, cookie-cutter, designed for obsolescence in no time Apple hardware with an old lock-me-in-Johnny, I-so-stupid so show me how (rather tell me how) to use my device shiny GUI on top of a good (which they didn't write of course but legally stole) FreeBSD OS known as IOS6.

I'm retiring or promoting my Nokia N900 to a carputer project so I can remote start my car by Wifi, SMS, or SSH. It will have a Nexus10 integrated into the dash replacing the Factory radio and will have a Stripped Dell Pentium M laptop with Linux for the backend. All HVAC controls will be touch controlled. Blower motor will be PWM Mosfet. Remote entry will be RFID, NFC (Samsung Tectiles), or SSH. (Solenoid door poppers). Wifi hotspot and GPS, Bluetooth tether and other display duties (FM RDS) will be handled by the N900. Wifi linking and media sync (podcasts auto dl'd) and video capture from the 4 always running cameras as well as OBD2 datalogging (ELM327), voice control and text to speech will be all Linux (ATT Truevoice or Cepstral) Smb and Nfs will be available as the car will always be wifi hs will be handled by a Raspberry Pi and GPIO for all this (no keys! power seat /mirror. memory and other logic will be PicAxe handled. Some voice prompts will be handled with WinBond ISD1000 or so series chips. Radio tuning and rds by si474 ics.

Anyway id rather use my old Nokia N900 than get a ip6. I was deciding btw nexus . and sgs3. Maybe Note 2. Sooo. someone like me would use the iphone as a paperweight. The sheep like 'em I hear...Reply

It's apparent from the vastly different review results popping up on the internet that different phones are running different versions. I'm not sure why google is allowing the reviews before the 13th or when the final build is released, but with such obvious benchmark discrepancies and battery life being vastly different from site to site something isn't jiving and frankly your doing a disservice to consumers by not waiting. Reply

Yet in the HD Offscreen benchmark both the iPhone and iPad score averagely.

I think we can safely conclude:Those Fill/Triangle Test are meaningless. So why on earth do you post them? Or tell us the use of them.

If a device scores exceptional in those, it still can deliver medioce 3D performance, so those benchmarks say NOTHING.If I have a car with a motor which can spin 100.000 rpm if the tires are lifted in the air, but on the road, it can't spin faster than 1000rpm, you know what? Then the 100.000rpm in air is meaningless.

Because of the huge number of meaningless charts (Fill/Trinangle) in your preview they just make everything confusing, and make it hard to compare the real performance of the devices.Reply

Agree. This kind of mess must stop now, its very difficult to interprete the results.Solution:I would prefer, the method used in the recent cromebook where you compared in the same software platform. A very seldom straight review that i appriciated very much.

Meaningless benchmark with little resemblance to practical usage must be omitted.

I know it probably means less numbers and bm, but so be it. It will improve in time. I know it cost tons on money to develop propor independant benching. But the Anand own sdd bm suite was a huge step forward for evaluating ssd, and really made Anandtech stand out as hands down the best site for the ssd stuff. We need something of that caliber.

This nonsense just leads to wrong interpretations and buying decicions, and can influence the development in wrong ways, meaning less money for real development and more for technical marketing.Reply

Agreed, those numbers do seem pretty much useless. Even if the GPU's can go that high in those benchmarks, they're probably bottlenecked by something else in the system, which makes the extra performance in those specific benchmarks pointless, and this is why the iPad scores much lower in the "full graphics tests" like Egypt HD, etc.Reply

These graphs are getting abused all over the internet. I saw an article yesterday where the author used a solitary triangle texture test graph to show the iphone / ipads superior graphics performance over rivals Beggars belief really.

I think Anandtech needs to educate its reader base more on what these low level tests actually mean and how they are rather meaningless in the context of real world performance.

Perhaps putting them into tables rather than giving them a pretty graph might help too.Reply

I don't think so.Cars with a higher hypothetical rpm in the air would almost certainly perform better than those that can't even perform well in the air.BTW, iPad/iPhones are highly tweaked to perform well under real life circumstances and user experience.Reply

Then tell me how HTC was able to deliver such a good battery life (according to AT) whereas they used a smaller battery than the Nexus 4 does. One does not have to make his own processor to achieve a better battery life.

The browser ratings are pretty bad, what AT did was a browser battery rundown. So page rendering was probably more CPU intensive on the Nexus 4 than on other smartphones. If the browser gets improved, so will the battery life, too.Maybe their review unit is defective, too (overheating, low battery life, poor results compared to reviews like TheVerge)

And finally, you shouldn't forget, that Android allows any background tasks to be active. iOS not, with their 'pseudo multitasking'. This gives iOS a huge advantage (far easier process managment, less memory needed, less CPU ressources wasted) but the user suffers.

Still, the battery life of the Nexus 4 doesn't look great, and I doubt that those numbers are correct, especially because TheVerge praised the Nexus 4 battery life.

Would be interesting to see the battery life of the identical (yet according to AT much more powerful) LG Optmius G. if it's much better, than their review unit is broken and/or the browser in Android 4.2 is broken.Reply

I am slightly worried that Anandtech is not treating all devices on a level playing field. You mention that the Optimus G could not complete the entire GLBenchmark test consecutively, as it crashed due to running out of memory or such like, so the benchmarks must have been run individually?, a far less taxing task than completing the entire benchmark in one run that Nexus 4 managed, hence the FPS were lower as the SoC hit thermal limits, which paints a poorer picture of the Nexus 4.

For the sake of openness and to dispel any talk of favoritism, could you please confirm whether the iPhone 5 / iPad GLBenchmark scores were the result of 1 serial run through the entire suite or multiple independent tests. I tried to run all test in one go on my Nexus 7 and it crashed, so if Apple devices can mange this feat, it would be cool to known the rationale for this, if not, then surely the Nexus 4 should be tested under the exact same methodology as any all other devices. Would you consider Linpack as an addition to your usual rigorous test suite.

I think your preview was useful in drawing attention to certain problems that need to be tackled in the full review.

I would like to ask that you heed 5 things in the full review;

1) It is good that you include a few older phones/tablets in your comparison with the 2 under review to give a historical perspective, but I think your table devotes too much space to some fairly obscure old models at expense of alternative buys to the 2 under review. Surely any comparative review should include all NEW flagship phones that people might buy as an alternative to those under review. You included the new LG Optimus G, in only a few graphs which left a very incomplete comparison. The SG3 has been updated to JB4.1 which gives different results but your graph does not tell you which you are comparing.

2) You have identified some big performance variations between the LG Optimus G and LG N4, indicating there may be design issues that need to be quickly fixed. They need to be fully investigated and Google's and LG's response to them, with a timescale to fixing the problem.

3) You identified unexplained performance differences between the 2 A15 based devices (N10 & Chromebook). They also need to be fully investigated and aired.

4) A number of posts suggest the Chrome Browser is not a useful benchmark. Need to carefully choose which benchmarks are used for the full review, to give the clearest objective picture.

5) I know your past full reviews have given detailed WiFi speed/distance benchmarks, so I trust your full review will include them, and also for the BT4, and a good test of the new Miracast wireless TV connection.

If Google/LG/Samsung are not able to fix the design issues quickly, I think it would be better that your full review is not released until they are, and perhaps publish an updated preview if the delay is long.Reply

1. Please, please say what version of Android you are testing for each phone. When available, test multiple versions (say ICS and JB). I find this more important than testing very different phones. It's good to keep track of the software evolution, mostly when it involves very different kernels.

2. Be scientific. Select a number of phones you want to test and be consistent with it. Don't test some phones on some benchmarks on others. It's totally useless.

3. Test different browsers. You got Chrome and Firefox on Android. Test them both, at least that would tell if the performance hits are due to the software being tested or the hardware (at least to some extent).Reply

In the 3G/4G battery performance chart, the iPhone 5 appears twice. In the tablet comparison, there is an "iPad 2.4". What is this? Make sure your tables are accurate before you post them or you lose all credibility.

As a complete aside, I upgraded from an iPhone 4 to an iPhone 5 and while the 5 gets about 8 hours of 4G battery life, there is no way the 4 got anywhere near as poor as 3.5 hours. It got 8, too. Very suspicious.Reply

The iPad 2,4 is the 4th iteration of the iPad 2, the one with the 32nm processor shrink. Not a typo. This is one of the most reputable tech sites out there, it'd take something big to lose credibility. Not some simple reader errorReply

For your second thing, Anand (and the others) have talked about that sort of thing before in their full product reviews (at least in the iPhone 5 one)

The benchmark does the same workload across all the phones, and since the 5 has LTE, it'll win due to race-to-sleep, which means (in the benchmark), the 5 is getting to spend much more time idle than the 4. Translate this to real world, and you usually (depending on the user) won't actually see the change going from 3G to LTE, due to the user's workload often changing thanks to the increased speed.

So, at least the idea proposed by them, a lot of people won't see the change in battery life due to their workload becoming much more intense, thanks to the better performance. Can't say if that was the case for you, but it does make sense.Reply

From all the tests above, and only hypothesizing here, we can see what apple has done right, although the qualcomm cpu is great technology and architecture wise, but they did a mistake they seem to always do, the ram is just dual channel 533mhz dd2 9 gb/sec, which is old by today's standard high performance SOCs, apple is using a ddr2 with more than 13 gb/sec , even the 1 year old tegra uses ddr3 (although single channel) I think the cpu and adreno 320 gpu are chocking with low memory rates and not enough data being present for processing, same goes for the exynos why are they using these low clock rams while apple is using quad channel ddr2 to maintain the performance which should be with more than 25 gb/sec speed which is needed for those high res screens and big GPUs, this is a design flow they have better cpu technology but the ram speeds are not on par ..... even if they needed it for power management, apple still does better even in that respect, maybe they turn off channels not being usedReply

I could use some help interpreting this preview. This really makes it look like Google is releasing a quad-core phone whose performance will be much poorer than that of other dual-core flagship phones, such as the Galaxy S3 and the iPhone 5 (which I assume is dual-core; apologies if I'm wrong). Compared to these other phones, the N4 has web page load times which are twice as long and the rest of the benchmarks are a really mixed bag. The benchmarks from Slashdot show the N4 having about the same 3D scores as my old Nexus S and other phones with supposedly lesser GPUs (see: http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/1... So what's going on here? Are the benchmarks misleading in some way that is not obvious, or is Google really releasing a quad-core, Adreno 320 flagship phone whose specs manage not to beat much older competitors?

I'm really having a hard time deciding what to buy. I don't want to waste my money. These benchmarks tell a pretty grim story about the N4 and make it look like an S3 would be a better choice. If only I wasn't so attached to stock Android...

So, basically this is AMD vs INTEL! One can spend more and get the Apple or spend less and get the Nexus. I always go with the "Unda Dog" and not to mention the better value, so Google Nexus it is. Reply

Quotes from the Apple fanboi that uses House MD as his avatar:"Bit of a non-issue for iOS users since their stock browser consistently dominates......because you didn't want to hear the fact that the already-out iPad will surpass this in performance by a long way...comparing new device vs new device, the Nexus 10 is miles behind the iPad 4..."

1. Would U please shut up! I have an idea. Anatech Stop listing Apple benchmarks in Android reviews so AppFboiz like you stop posting your crAPPaganda. I love the "ummm. I guess Nexus x sucks so I'm getting the Iphone" posts too. Either these fb's have icrap hardware and a Steve Jobs candlelit shrine already or they really are that stupid (in that case they are making the right choice)

NO! Android users don't bail to Apple on a review (maybe decide between other Android devices) so quit posting this crap. I don't post Android propaganda on Apple review sites and personally prefer it if Nokia STOOD BEHIND Maemo instead of flushing their business down the Symbian and Microsoft tubes but anyway the point....

The Nexus . IS new software as well as hardware. Show me a phone with 4.2 on it... and.... the new Iclone is just rehashed same-old, cookie-cutter, designed for obsolescence in no time Apple hardware with an old lock-me-in-Johnny, I-so-stupid so show me how (rather tell me how) to use my device shiny GUI on top of a good (which they didn't write of course but legally stole) FreeBSD OS known as IOS6.

I'm retiring or promoting my Nokia N900 to a carputer project so I can remote start my car by Wifi, SMS, or SSH. It will have a Nexus10 integrated into the dash replacing the Factory radio and will have a Stripped Dell Pentium M laptop with Linux for the backend. All HVAC controls will be touch controlled. Blower motor will be PWM Mosfet. Remote entry will be RFID, NFC (Samsung Tectiles), or SSH. (Solenoid door poppers). Wifi hotspot and GPS, Bluetooth tether and other display duties (FM RDS) will be handled by the N900. Wifi linking and media sync (podcasts auto dl'd) and video capture from the 4 always running cameras as well as OBD2 datalogging (ELM327), voice control and text to speech will be all Linux (ATT Truevoice or Cepstral) Smb and Nfs will be available as the car will always be wifi hs will be handled by a Raspberry Pi and GPIO for all this (no keys! power seat /mirror. memory and other logic will be PicAxe handled. Some voice prompts will be handled with WinBond ISD1000 or so series chips. Radio tuning and rds by si474 ics.

Anyway id rather use my old Nokia N900 than get a ip6. I was deciding btw nexus . and sgs3. Maybe Note 2. Sooo. someone like me would use the iphone as a paperweight. The sheep like 'em I hear...Reply

I'm not sure how compelling that ping time is! Surfing the web is often about hitting the server rapidly for little bits of data here and there so that 1.4 second ping time is gonna add quite a bit of time to your loading times. I personally don't care that much about the lack of LTE but that's a crazy high ping time even for HSPA+Reply

Pretty disappointed in how badly the Nexus 4 does in the battery life tests-since the battery is sealed inside you can't really get away with subpar battery life. I just got back from a vacation where my friend was constantly swapping his SIII's battery out since we were actively using the phone for GPS, camera, etc. all day. The extra cores also don't seem to do anything in the browser benchmarks which is rather disappointing.Reply

As usual Apple's products wipe the floor with the rest of competition, differences are huge in both performance and power consumption so whether you like it or not Apple is way to evolved than rest of it.Reply